Posts Tagged ‘Guantanamo Bay’

Errol Morris’ documentary on former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, based on 33 hours of interviews with Donald Rumsfeld, is set to open in theaters on April 2. Morris has been on the interview circuit talking up the new flick, writing op-eds in the New York Times, and perpetuating the invisible wall of immunity around Rumsfeld and the others who violated human rights as part of the “war on terror” started by the Bush Administration.

“I had a desire to make a very specific kind of film. I call it history from the inside out. This was also true of McNamara, Fog of War. How do they see the world? The memos, the oral history is a way in. I didn’t interview 15, 20 people. I interviewed one person.”(more…)

During President Obama’s recent speech about the pressing need to reform the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk data collection programs, he acknowledged that the US has exceeded the bounds of lawful surveillance in the past. In particular, he pointed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) secret directive to spy on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., further making the point that he would very likely not hold the office he does today had activists like Dr. King not continued to fight despite the presence of government repression.

Left out of his speech was any hint as to why the FBI might have monitored Dr. King in the first place. His work threatened a racist system of discriminatory social control.(more…)

For those who think that the debate surrounding torture ended with the hoopla around the film Zero Dark Thirty, think again. A recent report by the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (Task Force) lambasted doctors for their participation in torture at Guantanamo Bay. The doctors advised CIA and military interrogators on how to take advantage of prisoners’ fears and insecurities, and how to ultimately destroy their will to resist. The CIA’s Office of Medical Services oversaw and approved waterboarding, among other forms of torture. As Dr. Stephen Xenakis points out in a recent interview,

they were specifically giving the interrogators information on the health condition of the subjects, on vulnerabilities, on ideas about what their psychology was, so that they could be exploited . . . they were going to be exploited to exercise stress and coercion, with the idea that they were going to get better information.